Ozlem was the first tutor to join us when the Cookery school opened in March of 2014. Ozlem was born and brought up in the Aegean region of Turkey and learnt the art of Turkish cooking from her mother. She has now been living in England for over 26 years and is married with two grown up sons.

Ozlem has a great passion for cooking and culinary anthropology and is a member of the Slow Food movement, which encourages the maximisation of the enjoyment of the food we take in, and promotes the consumption of sustainably sourced and locally produced food. She strongly believes and supports the power of food education for a better future.

Ozlem is also the author of the book “Mutfaktaki Teselli”, “Consolation in the Kitchen” written in the Turkish language and published in Turkey. It is a mixture of memoir, cultural analysis along with her illustrations including recipes from her late mother’s kitchen.

Mariella Bliss is one our new tutors, she grew up in hot, chaotic, romantic and beautiful Naples. Her specific passions are bread, pasta and traditional food of Naples and the Amalfi Coast. She now joins the Honesty team of tutors to bring you her enthusiasm and knowledge of all things Italian. We very much look forward to testing her creations.

Honesty is proud to have two separate spaces that work well as relaxed and inspirational meeting venues.... be they for work or play!

The Honesty cookery school is the larger of the two spaces and is ideal for team building events and events where space is important. The school can offer breakfast and lunch at competitive prices and can provide cookery events which are ideal for team building or simply rewarding your hardworking staff.

Honesty Inkpen offers a smaller space where you can plan, discuss, eat, sleep and walk ! Adjacent to the Crown & Garter pub, hotel and restaurant you have all the facilities of a larger hotel but no plastic sandwiches or cold coffee !

The Crown & Garter restaurant in Inkpen serves well cooked everyday food. The menu is changed frequently so that our regular customers can usually find something new and interesting to entice their taste buds. We pride ourselves on our good service and can boast a high level of staff retention compared to other rural restaurants. We stock only European wines because we care about food miles. We are experimenting with more biodynamic wines and tend to buy from small producers. All our bread is made in our own bakery in Greenham near Newbury, produced using organic, stoneground flour. We strive to buy our produce and ingredients only from the Uk and wherever possible support small local producers.

Our hotel offers style and comfort at competitive prices in its own courtyard garden at the Crown & Garter near Hungerford. We cater for corporate guests as well as those seeking a quiet, rural place to stay. There are plenty of good walks, good views and good cycle routes close to the hotel.

Honesty was an idea that had been floating around my head on and off for a while before I was actually brave enough to take the plunge. To create a food business in a world dominated by big business was a daunting prospect. I wanted to show that food can be supplied to the consumer with honesty and integrity. Honesty in so far as people have the right to know exactly what is in their food, how it is produced and where it comes from. You can't expect people to make the right choices concerning the food they eat if they don't know these simple things. Integrity, in being able to create a business that can pay it's lowest paid staff above the minimum wage and not expect them to work all the hours. Integrity also in as much as respecting ones suppliers and seeing them as an integral part of your business not a group of people or businesses to be manipulated and pressurised into charging less for their goods than they should charge.

I have for many years been interested in the politics of food and am of the firm belief that in the majority of transactions it is the consumer who is valued least in the chain despite what is said to the contrary. Without wanting to state the obvious food is vitally important to the human race, not only because it sustains us but also because its consumption whether over or under can make us ill. It can for example affect the ability of our off spring to get the most from their lives. It has an effect on the relationship we have with our planet and life on that planet and it provides many of us with a living. Running a food business brings all of these issues and many more into sharper focus.

The cookery school was the first part of Honesty to get up and running. We wanted to create a great environment for learning about all things to do with food and drink, working with local tutors and doing some of the teaching myself has meant that we are able to keep the cost of the courses at an affordable level. At this stage we had already purchased The Crown and Garter and had a team of builders working on creating a relaxed, charming environment in which to enjoy food and drink. It had been a coaching inn since 1640 and had had little remedial structural work carried out on it for some years so you can imagine the state of the place once you started to delve below the surface. It needed plenty of work and when I say plenty I mean plenty, from the floorboards to the roof and pretty much everything in between. The place consists of a pub, restaurant and 10 hotel rooms. It is in an idyllic setting in Inkpen Village and is easy to fall in love with. The menu changes regularly to reflect the changing of the seasons. The food is simple, fresh and well cooked. When we first opened, the old skittle barn where the previous owners had lived, was turned into a bakery and a small coffee shop. The bakery quickly became too small once we started to supply some small local businesses with bread and cakes so we moved this part of the business to Greenham business park and extended the coffee shop. That coffee shop is now one of three that Honesty owns and runs, all in their local communities on small village high streets. It's all a challenge and most of the time is an enjoyable challenge. It is not easy but then things worth working for rarely are.

Honesty Inkpen is a beautiful place to enjoy breakfast, lunch or a cup of coffee. There is something about the atmosphere that makes me happy. It sits next to the Crown and Garter pub, restaurant and hotel, in the heart of the beautiful West Berkshire countryside and it truly is a super location. In the winter the coffee shop is cosy and inviting and in the spring or summer when the sun shines there are tables outside where customers can soak up the sun. It's an ideal spot for walkers or cyclists to sit and have a break, with plenty of room to leave cycles. It is also welcoming to children and dog walkers. We are still working on our homemade dog biscuits, which I do hope to see on sale in 2017. It is important for me that when we open coffee shops they sit well within the community which they serve. For too long commerce has helped to destroy community. With the community in mind we want to develop Honestyinkpen as a casual meeting place for groups within the vicinity and we shall be working on this, this year.

Once upon a time the coffee shop was a barn and part of the coaching inn. I imagine a place where the horses might have been rested, fed and watered on a journey somewhere. It was also used on one occasion as a place to lay out the corpses of two people who ended their days swinging on the gibbett at Combe. Thankfully it fills a happier role now. In later years it became a skittle alley for the pub and when I purchased the pub in 2014 it was a place of residence for the previous owner.

I took a gamble turning the barn, as it was then called, into a tiny coffee shop and artisan bakery, a gamble because it would have been easier to turn it into another bedroom for the hotel, but I like a challenge and I thought that it would add another dimension to the Crown and Garter having it as a coffee shop, and I think it has achieved this aim. Some people do just want somewhere to break a walk or a cycle ride and a pub restaurant can often mean you end up eating more than you originally intended, so we get a slightly different clientele to the pub clientele. It was lovely seeing it work as a coffee shop and a bakery when we first opened. The bakery walls, facing out to the coffee shop, were perspex sheets so that the customers could see the baker at work and the smells were enticing to say the least. It did quickly become apparent, however, that as soon as the demand for bread and cakes increased so the space at the bakery became inadequate. it did not take long to move the bakery to the unit at Greenham where we now produce the cakes in the day and the bread at night.

The upside was that we now have a lovely roomy space for a coffee shop that also doubles up as a private dining room in the evening. It is one of the nicest private dining rooms I have eaten in and although you could argue I am biased I am also my harshest critic so I feel my views can be taken as impartial overall. The space also makes a great place for meetings for businesses and as the coffee shop is served by the Crown and Garter kitchen a variety of hot or cold food for lunch or dinner is not a problem.

Take the time to pay us a visit in the new year. I can assure you that you will not be disappointed.

You can trace the history of human civilisation through the development of bread. Over the last 20 or 30 years, as a nation, we have treated it with contempt that it does not deserve. This is odd given there is little that touches the senses as much as freshly baked bread. The Chorleywood process changed the way bread was produced in this country. Minimum heed being paid to the health and well-being of the consumer, maximum attention being paid to the shelf life and bottom line. In comparison to our European neighbours, who have held onto their bread cultures, we have let our fall by the wayside. There is nothing really that demonstrates the decline in our food culture as does bread. Honesty Bakery, along with many other traditional bakeries, is trying to turn back the tide, making British bread great again.

Why not visit one of our coffee shops in either Lambourn, Kingsclere or Inkpen to try our traditionally made bread. Our Wholesale bakery in Greenham bakes daily to supply our outlets and those of many restaurants and cafes in the area.